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    How A Gay Community Helped The CDC Spot A COVID Outbreak — And Learn More About Delta

    When his friends started to get sick after a week of parties, Michael Donnelly started keeping track. His work — and his community's willingness to help — led the CDC to a major pandemic discovery.
    by Selena Simmons-Duffin Aug 06, 2021 7 minutes
    A data scientist working in tech, Michael Donnelly became an amateur COVID-19 watcher early in the pandemic. When his vaccinated friends started getting sick following July Fourth festivities in Provincetown, Mass., he documented more than 50 breakthrough cases that ultimately led the CDC to changing its guidance on masking.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a lot of ways to pick up on COVID-19 outbreaks, but those methods often take awhile to bear fruit.

    Not so with the Provincetown, Mass., cluster that started around July Fourth weekend. "We triggered the investigation as people were getting symptomatic," says Demetre Daskalakis, a deputy incident manager for the CDC's COVID-19 Response. "Pretty amazing — it is warp speed."

    How did they do that? It was thanks to a tip from a citizen scientist named Michael Donnelly. A data scientist in New York City's tech sector, he started publishing his own coronavirus data reports early in the pandemic and launched a website, COVIDoutlook.info, with Drexel University epidemiologist Michael LeVasseur.

    Following leads from his personal network, Donnelly documented over 50 breakthrough cases coming out of Provincetown, practically in real time, and shared it with the CDC as the outbreak was still unfolding.

    Without Donnelly's effort, the agency would have probably detected the outbreak at some point, Daskalakis says, but "it wouldn't have been as rapturous an initiation of an investigation and response as we had."

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